I act at times like a teenager (and there’s certainly more about that in Decalogue #6). I hang out with millennials here without compunction, and I feel unflustered camaraderie with them.

But I feel the difference, quite unexpectedly. My knees creak. My crows feet dig in. I’m likely closer to the end than the beginning by now. I go all avuncular here, despite myself. And I’m certainly more scarred and scared than I was two decades ago.

It makes me tear up now, and it made me tear up when I first learned it, at 15.

Cishet Man

I’m part of the entitled majority. I would have added “white”, but I’m not American, so we aren’t as race-conscious. (That in itself is an issue.)

I have no interest in apologising for being part of the entitled majority. I am who my chromosomes say I am, I have ended up where I have ended up. And apologies is not what those not so entitled need from me.

They do need from me not to be an arsehole about it. And in response to that, I try to listen. Including here.

I haven’t broadcast it here to date, just muttered it in comments; but you will find it if you go Googling at the right time-depth anyway. For about a year in my twenties, I identified as bi. It was pretty damn Gedanken and theoretical, and I certainly did not get any action out of it.

What I did get is the humbling experience of… getting it. Of getting how it felt to be in a minority.

And the even more humbling experience was a couple of years later, when I’d resumed identifying as het. And realising that I no longer “got it”.

I don’t get it, and I won’t get it. Those that do don’t need me to get it. They need me to let them speak, and not talk over them, and be an ally rather than a blocker. And I try.

It’s been work. It’s been solace. It’s been highs, it’s been lows. It’s been what any relationship worth the name has been. It’s been worth the work.

No kids. I’ve definitely left that too late. That’s an enduring regret, though a recent one. I’d have liked to pass things on, I’d have liked to… how did my socialist aunt put it? “Prepare good citizens.” On the other hand, I fear for the world they’d inherit.

But as the Hungarian-via-Esperanto proverb says: Bedaŭroj estas hundaj pensoj. Regrets are a dog’s thoughts.

Not quite sure what that means. We do have a dog, at least. And the dog’s meant a few sleepless nights, herself…